Standard museums shows favor austerity. That approach no longer interests Arthur Jafa. “I’ve done them,” he told me a few days after the opening of his New Museum survey, “I Am Tony.” “I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
What he posits instead is an exercise in besidedness, where things are “freely embodied, rather than constrained by imposed conceptual infrastructures, whether they be historical, aesthetic, or even just fucking interior design.” In “I Am Tony,” the 65-year-old artist applies this logic to nearly 40 years of his own work. Films, video installations, paintings, wallpapers, sculpture, and photographic objects fill two floors; among these works are Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, 2016, which made him one of the most discussed artists of his generation, and The White Album, 2018, which earned him the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Whatever the medium, Jafa treats the exhibition as an inquiry into sequencing. There is no prescribed route. Visitors can, as he put it, “do the show backwards, or on hands and knees, or upside down.”
Black music is the Tupelo, Mississippi-born artist’s “paradigmatic structure.” The show is fittingly named for Tony Williams, the polyrhythmic jazz drummer who played alongside Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Rhythm and pacing, he said, are not interchangeable: pacing is about how fast, and how deeply, a viewer can take in an image. APEX, 2013, which isn’t in the show, sets a metronomic run of stills to producer and DJ Robert Hood’s techno; SloPEX, 2022, takes those stills, slows them fivefold, and drains the color. That act of return, recasting existing material in a new tempo, runs through the entire exhibition.
To mark the survey, CULTURED connected with Jafa to discuss Cornel West, what Duchamp has to do with Justin Bieber, and the one piece of advice Kiki Smith gave him.
How do you think about rhythm and pace?
People have asked me about rhythm, but not pacing. They aren’t quite the same thing. Pacing, in my mind, is somehow bound up with rhythm’s relationship to the audience’s ability to perceive what is in front of them. Rhythm is more strictly a formal or metric dimension.
I’m very, very interested in how quickly or slowly or deeply or shallowly an audience apprehends or can process images. I even said to a good friend of mine that on a certain level it’s all an exercise in how many ways you can hold a person’s attention. Almost above and beyond the quote-unquote content of the work, that’s the first challenge for any artist.
If a person is walking across the room and you’re shooting them at 24 frames per second, you’ll have 24 evenly spaced pictures that describe that movement. If you shoot 12 frames per second and project it at 24, they’ll get there in half a second, which we perceive as fast motion. Shoot at 48, and they take two seconds. Those intervals are metronomic. Or you could do it non-metronomically, like in silent films, where they’re cranking cameras by hand and the exposure interval is irregular, which creates a completely different effect. It’s all tied to pacing, which for me equals: How do you present images to an audience? And how do you control how deeply and how quickly they can process what they’re seeing?
Is your piece SloPEX an experiment in that kind of distortion?
Completely. Somebody asked me the other day, did I change some of the images in SloPEX from APEX? Not a single one. The only thing I did was slow everything down five times, the sound and the image. I did take the color out of everything, just so that it would present a more consistent or flatter visual field. APEX is calibrated; the colors are calibrated in sequence to do certain kinds of things. In SloPEX, none of that.
I had APEX for years, and in my studio I was just messing around, and I slowed it down, and I just used to like it. I played it for years, and honestly, I liked it, but I didn’t really know if it was legitimate. I remember showing it to Gavin [Brown] and saying, “I think this is something.” And he said, “Oh, wow. It’s definitely something.”
So is SloPEX your dub version? You as King Tubby?
Maybe more like Basic Channel [the Berlin dub techno duo].
How do you want people to move through the show?
Some of this is possibly even dictated just by technological stuff, like LED projections, which are much, much brighter. They don’t require a darkened room. You could have spaces where people could walk in and out on either side, and not have to have light locks and sound locks. Black box is interesting because you get an optimal presentation of the work, but it does create a kind of dead end in exhibitions where you’re exhibiting multiple works. You come to it and it’s a dead stop. I do prefer the open LED presentation.
APEX could never be that centerpiece out loud. It would color everything. Whereas SloPEX is a ripple in a still pond. It’s almost glacial. I think it almost functions as a sort of EKG, as a stand-in for my consciousness. But for Love Is the Message, we’ve got to put headphones on, because there’s no way you’re going to have Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam” popping in and out over the course of a day. It’s going to be a cacophony. I like cacophony, but I like structured cacophony. I don’t like it to be random.
You’ve talked about the DJ and the selector shaping your work. Did that carry into the hang?
It was more than a consideration. It was what I was primarily preoccupied with. When I first presented a model of how I wanted to show the works, almost everybody from outside of my team thought it was too much, that it was going to collapse everything. And I said to people—I don’t know if you saw the exhibition at MoMA…
I did.
That wasn’t an empty exercise. Less is morbid, in my opinion. The answer to disorder and chaos in the world is not erasure. The answer is: How do things occupy a space collectively without erasing one another? So it’s philosophical, it’s political, but it is primarily formal, or aesthetic.
I’m just not interested in doing what we see in 99.9 percent of museum exhibitions, where there’s a thing on the wall, it’s got a certain amount of space around it, and there are certain ideas of balance and equilibrium. I get them. I’ve seen them my whole life. I’ve done them. I just don’t want to do it anymore.
I like to think this mode of presenting things is aligned with ideas I have around Black aesthetics—jazz in particular, or hip hop even. As I jokingly say sometimes, it’s the kind of order you come to understand when you come into being on a slave ship. Fred Moten said something like: paradoxically, in the hold of the slave ship, our bodies were radically constrained, but our imaginations were set loose. It’s in that space, the paradox of that constraint and freedom.
When “Less Is Morbid” came up, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. In some ways it was following the lead of an installation Amy Sillman did when MoMA first reopened [in 2019], “The Shape of Shape,” which is, to this day, one of the most mind-boggling things I’ve ever seen. I’ve even said, increasingly, that the greatest solo show is a solo show that feels like the greatest group show you’ve ever seen.
Were you making wallpapers before this show?
I’ve done wallpapers from the very first solo show I had, at the Serpentine in 2017. It’s just another way to present sequence and structure, blocks of images, and scale.
One of my favorite things about the New Museum show, which I have to give credit to Massimiliano [Gioni] for, is the inclusion of the car installation [My Black Death, remade here as MBD_Trans Am] I did back in 2001 at Artpace in San Antonio. He had no idea the sculptural thing was part of my practice from as far back. But it was from the very beginning. The very first show I had, maybe in ’99, was at Artists Space. I had sculpture, painting, performance, video, all in the space.
That was mostly because of Kiki Smith. It was an artists-select show, and the only advice she ever really gave me was, “Take up as much space as you can.” I just laughed when she first said it. She said, “Don’t start off narrowly. Don’t worry about the quality; worry about the energy.” I’m sort of collapsing that with something Thomas Hirschhorn said around the same time: “Energy, yes. Quality, no.” Energy is way more important than quality or refinement.
I recently saw a show with a glossary of references. Does a viewer need to know what they’re looking at to understand your work?
Not necessarily. But it’s interesting, and it can be informative. I tend not to like wall cards. The one thing I hate more than any single thing in any art space is walking around the show with the curator while they narrate what the work means. It’s like in Charlie Brown, when you never see the adults’ faces, and you just hear this [imitates the wah-wah voice].
I’d rather things be experienced on a much more sensorial than conceptual level. Information should color your experience of the work, but it’s not a safari. This is not the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Ideally, people should have the ability to do the show backwards, or on hands and knees, or upside down. You can go from the third floor up, or from the fourth floor down. Doesn’t matter to me.
You chose a video of Prince in a cream-and-white suit…
Incredible.
Incredible suit.
The whole thing is the suit.
And you’re such a good dresser yourself.
You saw my mention in Highsnobiety the other day?
Yeah. How did that make you feel?
I don’t know. Flattered, I guess. I didn’t like the pictures. I was like, I’ve got better fits than these. I would have curated slightly differently. But it was nice.
All these cats, Miles and Prince, they just had such specific sartorial visions. I think Prince’s sense of fashion was pretty terrible, honestly. I like it more when it was just his style versus his fashion sense. Dirty Mind–era Prince, wearing the trench coat and the Speedos and the stockings and the boots: that’s great. But by the time of post–Purple Rain, he starts having his suits made, and I find most of them tacky. But it’s all part of the whole thing. My taste is my taste.
Miles Davis had some very specific opinions. He would just say, “If I went and saw somebody play and they didn’t look right, I just knew they weren’t going to get into anything.” And this whole sartorial thing precedes anything I ever read. My dad was very into the way he dressed. Dressing a certain way, in style, is counter to the imposed abjection that’s so typical of Black being in this white supremacist environment.
But in the early ’80s, I read an interview Anders Stephanson did with Cornel West. Stephanson asks, “What about Black visual culture?” And Cornel says, “Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not that apparent.” It pissed a lot of people off. Howardena Pindell was really upset. But I always thought he got the terms wrong. It’s not Black visual culture that’s underdeveloped. It’s Black pictorial culture. When people dress a certain way, you don’t hear it. You don’t smell it. You see it. And that seeing and being seen is Black visual culture.
Cornel’s explanation was brilliant, though. The Black church was the primary institution Black people had, and it was a Protestant church, with this iconoclasm embedded in it. There was always space made for oratory, music, and dance under the roof of the Black church. But there was no space for the Black visual artist. My parents converted to Catholicism when I was maybe 7 or 8, and when we started attending the Immaculate Conception in Clarksdale, I was an altar boy, the whole thing. The Catholic Church is totally different. There are statues and iconography.
Catholicism has such a culture of ornament.
Adornment. It’s no accident: Basquiat. Puerto Rican mom, Haitian dad. He’s a Black American, a New York kid, but he’s got two immigrant parents. It’s not the up-from-the-Deep-South-into-the-Northern-cities thing. It’s a completely different trajectory.
So Basquiat is like… I was laughing at this. He’s like Drake. He Black, but he not like us. That’s what I always think they got wrong. They say “not like us” as if Drake’s not Black. No, he Black, he just not Black like us. Meaning he’s Black, but the slavery thing is very mitigated by his mixed parentage. But shit, he’s fucking Larry Graham’s nephew. He [Graham] was the bass player in Sly and the Family Stone. So I’m like, I don’t care what you say, he’s super Black. He’s just not Black like us.
Why Justin Bieber, in Bieber Descending from 2026?
It’s not a straightforward presentation of Justin, because it’s multiple images of him stacked, which immediately goes to Nude Descending a Staircase. That was Duchamp’s Cubist moment, where he was doing the space-time thing that African artifacts provoked and implied, which got mapped out in Western painting. But the title is also a reference to Justin Bieber’s struggles over the last several years. His embrace of Jesus. The way he was embraced by Kanye during the Sunday Service phase. There’s an incredible video of Justin Bieber singing with Sunday Service. It may be the most soulful thing he’s ever done. It’s a church level of soulfulness.
He’s a white person who’s immersed in Black culture. He’s an interesting artist. And he’s pretty, too. Handsome, whatever. And his whole fashion thing, which was called dirtbag: super interesting, super intentional. He very easily, to me, sits inside of my preoccupation with the Black figure.
Did you see his World Cup final performance?
I wasn’t too knocked out by that. I’m scratching my head about that one.
Does it bother you when your work is read as protest art?
It doesn’t bother me how it’s read, but my work is not protest art. I’m not interested in protesting things. I am interested in resisting certain kinds of things, and, ideally, transcending those things. My work is always concerned with being as free as possible. Free of the drag of white supremacy and patriarchy.
Are you tired of being asked about Kanye?
I’m always excited to talk about Kanye. He’s obviously one of the most interesting artistic figures of this century. I’m tired of people trying to bushwhack me, trying to get me to say something controversial or clickbait-y about Kanye. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been incredibly generous with me, from Love Is the Message onward. It’s like a booby trap, but everybody has the same booby trap, so it’s boring.
When I told colleagues about this interview, a lot of them said, “Ask him about Kanye.” I didn’t want to. But I guess I just did, in a backhanded way.
You’re the first person to ask me how I feel about being asked about Kanye, as opposed to asking me about Kanye.
You’ve said you want to make a film about Larry Levan. What would it look like?
That’s a dream project. I always saw it as a Black Saturday Night Fever meets I Am Legend. A horror film. The Andromeda Strain, because it’s about the emergence of house music and Black gay culture in conjunction with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic.
The people I would want to make biographical films about: Larry Levan, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson. That’s kind of it. I’m interested in Black masculinity. Robert Johnson, to me, was a prototype for what Black masculinity was going to look like in the 20th century, coming out of the 19th century. Bluesmen were moving around and had a certain mobility, a certain kind of fluidity, flow, currency that was much more typical of how Black people move around now than how Black people moved around in the teens and the 1920s, coming out of slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, the terror of Mississippi and the Deep South. The bluesman moved in a way that was paradoxical, given that moment in time.
Even my stories that aren’t about specific figures take the structure of Black music as the paradigmatic structure, the way I want to structure my films. Or they have characters driven by the things I associate with musicians: expressivity, movement. Just drift. Not going anywhere in particular. Everybody wants to talk about appropriation, but people never say dérive, which is what it is. It’s a situationist strategy. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is just about a cat who’s on the run. Or Bush Mama by Haile Gerima: the sister is just walking, walking, walking. Walking as process, not about the point of arrival or departure. Drapetomania [a 19th-century pseudo-diagnosis that cast enslaved people’s flight as mental illness], you know? I need to get that tattoo.
What’s the aim of your residency in Bahia?
The aim is to be out of here. Brazil is a fascinating place because it’s not Africa. It’s Africa in the Americas, but in a completely different way than Africa in the United States. Brazil is just a rich, dense formulation of Blackness. Even the white folks are Black there, you know what I mean? It’s no racial utopia. But I found it to be a rich environment. And then there are the filmmakers. If you’re interested in Black aesthetics and how it might map itself onto the cinema, a filmmaker like Glauber Rocha, or the filmmaker who made this early film called Limite [Mário Peixoto]. I saw it 30 years ago. It was really amazing.
I’m looking for a place to fall back to a little bit. A place where I can think in a different way than I’ve thought up to this point in my life. I’m very much looking to cinema now. I have a love story that I’m super excited about. And then I have this other thing that’s much more of a banger. It’s probably one of the wildest things I’ve conceived in the last 15, maybe even 20 years.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Here’s Where Media Insiders Actually Get Their News
Is LA Still a Painter’s Town? Juliana Halpert on the City’s Fall Gallery Openings
Art-Market Guru David Schrader on What Young Collectors Really Want
Want to Dress Like An Architect? 16 Design Industry Insiders Share Their Wardrobe Workhorses
You Can Tell Lindsey Vonn to Slow Down. You Just Can’t Expect Her to Listen.
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
